How to Read Water: Clues and Patterns from Puddles to the Sea: Learn to Gauge Depth, Navigate, Forecast Weather, and Make Other Predictions with Water

369 Pages·2016·10.8 MB·English

by  Tristan Gooley

A T G
LSO BY RISTAN OOLEY
The Lost Art of Reading Nature’s Signs
The Natural Navigator
The Natural Explorer
How to Connect with Nature

To the Gs, Ks, Ms, and Bs
HOW TO READ WATER: Clues and Patterns from Puddles to the Sea
Copyright © 2016 by Tristan Gooley
Illustrations copyright © 2016 by Neil Gower
Photographs copyright © 2016 by Tristan Gooley
Additional photo credits at the end of the book
Originally published in the UK by Sceptre in 2016.
First published in North America by The Experiment, LLC, in 2016.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Gooley, Tristan, author. | Gower, Neil, illustrator.
Title: How to read water : clues and patterns from puddles to the sea / Tristan Gooley ; illustrations by Neil
Gower.
Description: New York, NY : The Experiment, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016021060 (print) | LCCN 2016016408 (ebook) | ISBN 9781615193592 (e-book) |
ISBN 9781615193585 (cloth)
Subjects: LCSH: Water.
Classification: LCC GB671 (print) | LCC GB671 .G66 2016 (ebook) | DDC 551.46--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016021060
ISBN 978-1-61519358-5
Ebook ISBN 978-1-61519359-2
Cover design by Sarah Smith
Author photo by Ben Queenborough
Manufactured in the United States of America
Distributed by Workman Publishing Company, Inc.
Distributed simultaneously in Canada by Thomas Allen and Son Ltd.
First printing August 2016
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Strange Beginnings: An Introduction
1   Launching
2   How to See the Pacific in a Pond
3   Land Ripples
4   The Not-So-Humble Puddle
5   Rivers and Streams
6   The Rise
7   The Lake
8   The Color of Water
9   Light and Water
10   The Sound of Water
11   Reading Waves
12   The Omani Delight: An Interlude
13   The Coast
14   The Beach
15   Currents and Tides
16   Water at Night
17   Shipwatching
18   Rare and Extraordinary
19   Uncharted Water: An Epilogue
Sources, Notes, and Further Reading
Selected Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Picture Acknowledgments
Index
About the Author
Strange Beginnings
An Introduction
WE CAN LOOK at the same stretch of water every day for a year and not see
the same thing twice. How does one compound behave with such diversity? And
what do the differences we see from day to day and from one place to the next
actually signify? This is a book about the physical clues, signs, and patterns to
look for in water, whether you are standing by a puddle or gazing out across
miles of ocean.
Many books have been written in the past that claim to be about water, but
even the good ones like to deceive by treating water as a container. In these
books water is seen as a box that creatures live in or a window through which we
can view things. In this book water will not be relegated in this way; it will be
treated as the subject. Animals and plants are very interesting and will earn their
place if they help to explain the behavior of the water we see, but not the other
way around. And we will be focusing on water in its liquid form, not ice, snow,
or steam. Unusually for a nature book, I will show no preference for organic
over inorganic clues: A buoy is as good as a barnacle, if it helps us to read the
water. That makes this book sit to one side of conventional natural history
books, but it remains wholeheartedly a book about nature.
Water, many scientists now believe, is a substance so elemental to our
universe that it may actually be many millions of years older than our own solar
system. Fittingly, it has long held our attention; great minds have mined the
experience of looking at water for millennia. Its impact on us philosophically,
physiologically, and even spiritually has been thoroughly explored in literature.
The late Roger Deakin pointed out that giraffes are the only mammals that
cannot swim and that we have webbing between our thumbs and forefingers,
unlike other apes, adding to the powerful arguments in support of the popular
theory that we are drawn to water biologically as well as philosophically. Water
is apparently good for our minds, bodies, and souls.
The anthropologist, Loren Eiseley, once opined:
If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water.
That may be true, but what fascinates me is our ability to find meaning by
understanding the physical causes of the patterns we see in water. Both
perspectives, philosophical and practical, depend on taking the time to look and I
strongly believe that this is much more likely if we have something to look for.
Understanding the things we see and the reasons for them does not reduce
the beauty of the whole—quite the opposite. As I discovered a few years ago,
once you learn that you can measure the size of raindrops by looking at the
colors in a rainbow—the more red, the bigger the drops—rainbows take on a
new beauty and lose none. The same is true of all the signs we find in bodies of
water. There is room for poetical and analytical minds to stand on the same
quayside. We can appreciate the beauty of the glittering path below the setting
sun and enjoy reading the clues in its form.
IN A SURPRISINGLY HOT OSLO, I helped scrub barnacles and algae from the
underside of the inflatable boat. Preparations were being made to take one of the
most beautiful vessels I have ever seen from Norway to England.
An old friend had been unable to fill his space as “delivery crew” and I could
not have been happier to be standing on this Norwegian pontoon as his
replacement. In front of me lay almost thirty yards of perfect lines, a modern
classic yacht styled on the iconic J Class boats of the 1930s. The sun bounced off
the water onto an immaculate white hull that supported dark decking and
blemish-free brass.
This beautiful yacht was rumored to be the love-child of an American
nautical architect who had married a very wealthy heiress—it was that rarest of
things: a daydream meeting an appropriate bank balance. Someone whispered
that the log-burning stove in the luxurious saloon had to be built as a one-off, the
front glass panel specially commissioned at a cost of thousands of dollars, to